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5 hours ago
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It seems at first to be your standard six-part mystery-thriller. The Ridge opens with the protagonist, Mia (Lauren Lyle, last seen in The Bombing of Pan Am 103 and as the eponymous Karen Pirie, and so good in everything) having nightmares about her traumatic childhood. She wakes to a morning routine of yoga and deep breathing – though that doesn’t seem to help as much as the opioid patch she whacks on her thigh – before heading to the local hospital, where she works as an anaesthetist and where a patient comes round during an operation, then dies on the table.
But that is only the first layer of what becomes a veritable millefeuille of a drama. For Mia then heads off to Te Koi Ridge in New Zealand to attend the wedding of her semi-estranged, ecowarrior younger sister, Cassy (Connor Amor-Bendall). As the plane takes off, Mia receives a call from Cassy begging for help. By the time the plane touches down, Cassy is missing and the townsfolk, including her fiance, Ewan Carmichael (Jay Ryan), and his best friend, Teddy (Kauri Williams), are out looking for her. Teddy finds her body at the bottom of a cliff. Did the experienced climber fall, as everyone seems willing to assume, or was she – as Mia is far more ready to believe – pushed?
From there, the tale expands to include multiple complications. There are seething tensions between the local people and the eco-activists who, having been led by Cassy despite Ewan’s objections, are becoming more and more extreme in their efforts to stop farmers harming the land. Tractors are burning, livelihoods are threatened. There is the tangled web of interrelationships – familial, friendly and otherwise – that besets any small town. The local sergeant, for example, is Ewan’s half-sister – an offshoot of the Carmichael family, which dominates the town – and her husband is its undertaker. The opportunities and motives for murder and cover-ups begin to proliferate nicely.
Then there is Ewan’s mother, who has dementia, her condition used as a plot-device to let slip clues to secrets she can no longer keep, sending Mia haring off down another avenue of discovery. There is also the group of disaffected youngsters, including Ewan’s niece, who get wind of Mia’s addiction and are keen to trade information for the dwindling opioid supply she stole from the hospital drug cupboard before she left, plus the video Mia finds on Cassy’s phone of her sister secretly skinny-dipping with someone who is not Ewan. Finally, there is the death 15 years ago of Ewan’s then-high school girlfriend, Hera, in an apparent suicide, and someone leaves a cutting about the case on the windscreen of Mia’s car. Will this or Ewan’s eventual admission that he and Cassy rowed before he left her to her climbing expedition be enough to curtail the growing attraction between Mia and her late sister’s fiance? We will have to wait until episode three to find out.
It is all woven together in a masterly fashion, along with the accumulating professional problems in the UK as the violent, criminal family of the patient who died demands retribution and managers begin to look more closely at Mia’s records. The inherent strangeness and wild beauty of the New Zealand setting add a dash of menace to every scene, a sense that anything might be possible if you take your eye off someone or something for a moment too long. The festering resentments of a small town, the secrets everyone knows and those just a few guard closely feel real and unnaturally potent. But the real glory is Mia: a difficult, dislikable, manipulative individual, she is admirably fearless and ferocious, good and bad by turns, with all of it stemming from the damage done to her, and to Cassy, by a monstrous mother over the course of a monstrous childhood. It is a magnificent performance by Lyle, who is beginning to specialise in iconoclastic characters who throw viewers off balance and demand a rolling recalibration of entire dramas each time they appear in their scenes.
It is also bitterly funny, often in ways that make it achingly real and add to the melancholy at its heart. When Cassy’s body arrives at the house in an open casket for the wake, for example, her makeup is horribly overdone. “She looks like the portrait from Elton John’s attic!” Or when Mia is explaining that obesity can undermine the efficacy of anaesthesia on a patient. What killed hers was: “Three stab wounds and too many pies.”
If you’ll pardon the pun, get stuck in. The Ridge is good, good stuff.
